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How Climate Denial Greased Trump's Assent to Fibber-in-Chief
Where the GOP learned to lie as a matter of course is an interesting question, and as a long-time climate activist I’ve had a front row seat: It’s the climate fight, more than anything else, that taught them to regard reality as optional.
Feb 03, 2026
The past stretch of days—say, since the murder of Renee Good—has been marked by brutality, but also by a dishonesty so deep and stupid that it’s begun to finally turn on the liars. Following the execution of Alex Pretti, for instance, various White House officials were quick to start just plain lying: He was an “assassin” and a “domestic terrorist” who "wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement."
As many videos emerged in the course of the day, those lies were shown for what they were. Pretti was, at worst, trying to help a woman who was being unnecessarily gassed; for his pains he was executed once he’d been disarmed; the only “weapon” he’d “brandished” was a cell phone. Oh, and instead of being a domestic terrorist he was a VA nurse who treated former soldiers with compassion and dignity.
Politicians, it goes without saying, have sometimes engaged in dishonesty, often with hideous consequences. The Gulf of Tonkin “attacks” that gave America an excuse for war in Vietnam were at least in part fabrications; the “weapons of mass destruction” weren’t in Iraq and there was no compelling reason to think they were. Hell, we had a president—Richard Nixon—known as Tricky Dick for the smears and fibs that marked his whole career, from his first congressional race to the last days of Watergate. But the presidents who told those lies generally attempted to manufacture cover stories or cloud them in enough shadows that they might pass for mistakes. By now, however, we’ve reached a point where the president and his party just recite up-is-down lies constantly. Consider this reckoning of President Donald Trump's first term:
When The Washington Post Fact Checker team first started cataloguing President Donald Trump’s false or misleading claims, we recorded 492 suspect claims in the first 100 days of his presidency. On Nov. 2 alone, the day before the 2020 vote, Trump made 503 false or misleading claims as he barnstormed across the country in a desperate effort to win reelection. This astonishing jump in falsehoods is the story of Trump’s tumultuous reign.
By the end of his term, Trump had accumulated 30,573 untruths during his presidency—averaging about 21 erroneous claims a day. What is especially striking is how the tsunami of untruths kept rising the longer he served as president and became increasingly unmoored from the truth. Trump averaged about six claims a day in his first year as president, 16 claims day in his second year, 22 claims day in this third year—and 39 claims a day in his final year.
Put another way, it took him 27 months to reach 10,000 claims and an additional 14 months to reach 20,000. He then exceeded the 30,000 mark less than five months later.
The second term, obviously, is far worse than the first. At this point, it would be far easier for the Post to assign a reporter to list the true things the president says—a list as short as his… temper. (And of course the second-term Post wouldn’t do this, since its owner has castrated one of America’s great papers in an effort to curry favor with the fibber-in-chief). Every lie he tells is then repeated by his satraps in the administration and Congress—the closest they come to shame is when they lie and say that they haven’t heard his latest lies so they don’t have to publicly swallow them. Here at home we’ve gotten so used to this that the lies often barely register—but when Trump went to Davos and gave a speech literally filled with whoppers, European leaders were astonished. He was telling them things that they knew to be absurd—that China has no wind farms, say—and expecting them to go along.
Where the GOP learned to lie as a matter of course is an interesting question, and I’m afraid I’ve had a front row seat. I think it’s the climate fight, more than anything else, that taught them to regard reality as optional. And I think this because I remember the start of it all. When Jim Hansen first testified before the Senate that global warming was real, it caused a society-wide stir; running for the White House, the sitting vice-president George Herbert Walker Bush said he would combat the greenhouse effect with “the White House effect.” He made no attempt to deny it, or pretend it wasn’t a problem; it was reality, he wanted to lead the world, he had to at least pretend to deal with it.
And of course he could have—he could have resurrected Jimmy Carter’s plans (only eight years old) for a rapid solar research and development program, for instance. He seemed like he might; during the campaign he promised to convene a "global conference on the environment at the White House" during his first year in office. That didn’t happen, and it’s fairly easy to figure out why.
At about this same time—1989-1990—the fossil fuel industry was making a fateful decision. They were well aware that global warming was real; as a series of archival documents and whistleblowers have now laid out in excruciating detail, the big oil companies had conducted their own research programs, and reached conclusions just like Hansen’s. (Indeed, Exxon’s internal estimates of how hot the world would be by 2020 turned out to be even more accurate than NASA’s). We know that the executives of these companies believed their scientists—Exxon, for instance, began building drilling rigs higher to compensate for the rise in sea level they knew was coming, and plotting which corners of the Arctic to lease for drilling once it had inevitably melted.
It always has seemed to me that the worst fate would be to walk over this cliff without knowing it was there. Dignity demands understanding.
But they decided, across the industry, that the price of telling the truth would be too high. Inevitably it would mean having to leave at least some of their reserves of coal, gas, and oil in the ground, and those reserves were valued in the tens of trillions of dollars. And so they started forming the coalitions and councils, hiring the veterans of the fights over tobacco and asbestos and even DDT—they started lying.
Their lies were, at first, made concessions to some notion of plausibility. The science was “uncertain.” It was mostly China’s fault. Climate always fluctuates. Computer models are “unreliable.” And so on—these were never good-faith objections, they were always the arguments from selfishness. And as time went on they became more and more outlandish. Before the 1990s were over, the CEO of Exxon was telling a key crowd of Chinese leaders that the Earth was cooling and that it would make no difference if we waited a quarter century to start phasing out fossil fuels. Again, his scientists had assured him that this was nonsense years before.
It took a while for this to filter down through the entire GOP ecosystem. George W. Bush actually ran for president in 2000 promising to officially establish that carbon dioxide was a pollutant and to regulate its emissions. Shortly after taking office, however, his vice-president—oil-patch CEO Dick Cheney—held a series of private meetings with his industry brethren, and before long W. announced that he had made a mistake and that CO2 was not in fact a problem.
That was the signal for the rest of the Republican party—save for a few iconoclasts like John McCain—to fall in line, and by the time he ran for president even McCain had pretty much given up talking about global warming. The biggest donors by far to GOP campaign funds were the Koch brothers and the vast network they had assembled of right-wing billionaires—and the Koch brothers were the biggest oil and gas barons in America, owners of an unrivaled fleet of pipelines and refineries. The efforts of this group of oil-adjacent cronies became ever more extreme—eventually they were funding groups to put up billboards equating climate scientists with Charles Manson.
And eventually, inevitably, it produced a president who felt no compunction about just saying that climate change wasn’t real, and using all the power he could muster to kill off both the scientific effort that had alerted us to the crisis, and the policy effort to do something about it. His crew assisted in this cover-up in all the usual ways—we learned January 30, for instance, that a federal judge had ruled that the Department of Energy’s effort to produce a report pooh-poohing climate danger had violated all manner of federal law.
Judge William Young of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts said the Energy Department did not deny that it had failed to hold open meetings or assemble a balance of viewpoints, as the law requires, when it created the panel, known as the Climate Working Group.
“These violations are now established as a matter of law,” wrote Judge Young, who was nominated to the bench by Ronald Reagan. He said the Climate Working Group was, in fact, a federal advisory committee designed to inform policy, and not, as the Energy Department claimed, merely “assembled to exchange facts or information.”
What makes this campaign of deception all the more remarkable is that it’s happened even as the actual facts of global warming have become painfully clear. Back in 1988 it was still pretty much theory; now it’s flood and fire, storm and sea-level rise. We live on a planet losing the ice at its poles, and the vast coral reefs in between, where tens of millions of humans are already on the move because their homes can no longer support them. It’s also remarkable because in 1988 the solutions were hard—solar power was still the most expensive energy on Earth. Now it’s the cheapest. Most of the world has recognized these truths, coming together if fitfully to try and least talk about it. But whenever America is in the hands of Republicans it just walks away.
Perhaps, given this long history, I can offer a few hard-earned ideas about how to try and deal with Trump’s many assaults on the truth. They won’t do all that we might hope, but they’re nonetheless important.
- Don’t give up. Telling the the truth repeatedly actually can work. Because more than 80% of Americans saw the video of Alex Pretti’s execution, the lies backfired. And at least in part because 95% of Americans live in counties that have had a federally declared disaster since 2011, it’s hard to convince most people that there’s not something afoot. Indeed, polling demonstrates that public concern and understanding of climate change has held relatively stable for the last 30 years, with about two-thirds of Americans acknowledging that we’ve got trouble. And since it’s clear that about one-third of America is beyond the reach of fact or feeling, that’s not bad.
- More than ever we need to support independent media. Throughout Trump’s second term, it’s been as much Substackers, YouTubers, and others of this breed who’ve been keeping things straight as it has the ‘legacy media.’ (As one small example, check out this epic—in both content and length—rant about renewable energy’s benefits that appeared on YouTube over the weekend). That legacy media is increasingly craven and corrupted (see, for instance, CBS News), or just simply out of business—we now have big cities in America without daily newspapers. The administration clearly recognizes this trend—that’s why they’re trying to prosecute Don Lemon, Georgia Fort, and others covering the Minnesota debacle. Many of these independent journalists have a point of view—I certainly do. And I can tell you that, though I continue to work for and love brave institutions like the New Yorker, I’m also very grateful for things like Substack that are increasingly taking up the slack. (Tips on how to support Lemon and Fort here)
- Even on days when one despairs (and that’s an awful lot of days) it’s good to remind oneself that the truth has real value in and of itself. I’ve written more words than anyone else on the climate crisis—one motivation was to try and spur action, but another was simply to record and spread this news. It always has seemed to me that the worst fate would be to walk over this cliff without knowing it was there. Dignity demands understanding.
I have no idea if I’ll live to see the day when the truth regains a strong footing in our culture, but I do have a certain amount of faith it will happen eventually, if only because reality reality ultimately trumps (not Trumps) political reality. Physics and chemistry are functional truth, despite their liberal bias. I remember the week after Hurricane Sandy hit New York shutting down the financial district, and the cover of Business Week magazine was simply a big block of text: “It’s Global Warming Stupid.” Eventually that message will get through; our job is to see if we can make that happen before the damage is any worse than it has to be.
Oh, and word on the street is that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is going after Springfield Ohio this week—home of the biggest lie of the last election campaign. Haitians are not eating cats and dogs. ICE is killing good people. The last three years are the hottest on record. Pass it on.
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Trump's DHS Using Secretive Subpoenas to Demand Critics’ Personal Data: Report
"These types of abusive subpoenas are designed to intimidate and sow fear of government retaliation," said a lawyer for the ACLU.
Feb 03, 2026
The Department of Homeland Security is using a little-known legal power to surveil and intimidate critics of the Trump administration, according to a harrowing report published Tuesday by the Washington Post.
Experts told the Post that DHS annually issues thousands of "administrative subpoenas," which allow federal agencies to request massive amounts of personal information from third parties—like technology companies and banks—without an order from a judge or a grand jury, and completely unbeknownst to the people whose privacy is being invaded.
As the Post found, even sending a politely critical email to a government official can be enough to have someone's entire life brought under the microscope.
That is what Jon, a 67-year-old retiree living in Philadelphia, who has been a US citizen for nearly three decades, found out after he sent a short email urging a DHS prosecutor, Joseph Dernbach, to reconsider an attempt to deport an Afghan asylum seeker who faced the threat of being killed by the Taliban if he was forced to return to his home country.
In the email, Jon warned Dernbach not to "play Russian roulette" with the man's life and implored him to “apply principles of common sense and decency.”
Just five hours after he sent the email, Jon received a message from Google stating that DHS had used a "subpoena" to request information about his account. Google gave him seven days to respond to the subpoena, but did not provide him with a copy of the document; instead, it told him to request one from DHS.
From there, he was sent on “a maddening, hourslong circuit of answering machines, dead numbers, and uninterested attendants,” which yielded no answers.
Within weeks of sending the email, a pair of DHS agents visited Jon's home and asked him to explain it. They told Jon that his email had not clearly broken any law, but that the DHS prosecutor may have felt threatened by his use of the phrase "Russian Roulette" and his mention of the Taliban.
Days later, after weeks of hitting a wall, Google finally sent Jon a copy of the subpoena only after the company was contacted by a Post reporter. It was then that Jon learned the breadth of what DHS had requested:
Among their demands, which they wanted dating back to Sept. 1: the day, time, and duration of all his online sessions; every associated IP and physical address; a list of each service he used; any alternate usernames and email addresses; the date he opened his account; his credit card, driver’s license, and Social Security numbers.
Google also informed him that it had not yet responded to the subpoena, though the company did not explain why.
But this is unusual. Google and other companies, including Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon, told the Post that they nearly always comply with administrative subpoenas unless they are barred from doing so.
With the ACLU's help, Jon filed a motion in court on Monday to challenge the subpoena issued to Google.
"In a democracy, contacting your government about things you feel strongly about is a fundamental right," Jon said. "I exercised that right to urge my government to take this man's life seriously. For that, I am being investigated, intimidated, and targeted. I hope that by standing up for my rights and sharing my story, others will know what to do when these abusive subpoenas and investigations come knocking on their door."
As the Trump administration uses DHS and other agencies to compile secret watchlists and databases of protesters for surveillance, targets people for deportation based solely on political speech, and asserts its authority to raid residences without a judicial warrant, administrative subpoenas appear to be another weapon in its arsenal against free speech and civil rights.
According to “transparency reports” reviewed by the Post, Google and Meta both received a record number of administrative subpoenas during the first six months of the second Trump administration. In several instances, they have been used to target protesters or other dissidents for First Amendment-protected activity:
In March, Homeland Security issued two administrative subpoenas to Columbia University for information on a student it sought to deport after she took part in pro-Palestinian protests. In July, the agency demanded broad employment records from Harvard University with what the school’s attorneys described as “unprecedented administrative subpoenas.” In September, Homeland Security used one to try to identify Instagram users who posted about [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement] raids in Los Angeles. Last month, the agency used another to demand detailed personal information about some 7,000 workers in a Minnesota health system whose staff had protested Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s intrusion into one of its hospitals.
“These types of abusive subpoenas are designed to intimidate and sow fear of government retaliation," said Stephen A. Loney, a senior supervising attorney for the ACLU of Pennsylvania. "If you can’t criticize a government official without the worry of having your private records gathered and agents knocking on your door, then your First Amendment rights start to feel less guaranteed. They want to bully companies into handing over our data and to chill users’ speech. This is unacceptable in a democratic society.”
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'Smear Campaign' Detected as DHS Claims About Pair Shot by Border Patrol Unravel in Court
"You don’t see evidence of gang association," said one legal expert. "It just feels like a dirtying up of the defendant."
Feb 03, 2026
After a US Border Patrol Agent shot two Venezuelan immigrants in Portland, Oregon in January, the Department of Homeland Security claimed that the two victims were "vicious Tren de Aragua gang members" who "weaponized their vehicle" against federal agents, who had no choice but to open fire in self-defense.
However, court records obtained by the Guardian reveal that a Department of Justice prosecutor subsequently told a judge the government was "not suggesting" that one of the victims, Luis Niño-Moncada, was a gang member.
The Guardian also obtained an FBI affidavit contradicting DHS claims about the second victim, Yorlenys Zambrano-Contreras, being "involved" in a shooting in Portland last year, when in reality she was a "reported victim of sexual assault and robbery."
Attorneys representing Niño-Moncada and Zambrano-Contreras, who both survived the shooting and were subsequently hospitalized, told the Guardian that neither of them have any prior criminal convictions.
Legal experts who spoke with the Guardian about the shooting said it appeared that DHS was waging a "smear campaign" against the victims.
Sergio Perez, a civil rights lawyer and former US prosecutor, noted in an interview that prosecutors filed criminal charges against Niño-Moncada and Zambrano-Contreras just two days after they were shot, even before it had obtained crucial video evidence of the incident.
"This government needs to go back to the practice of slow and thorough investigations," he told the Guardian, "rather than what we consistently see in immigration enforcement activities—which is a rush to smear individuals."
Carley Palmer, a former federal prosecutor, told the Guardian that the court records obtained by the paper don't show DOJ presenting any of the usual evidence that prosecutors use to establish defendants' alleged gang membership.
"What’s interesting about the filings is that you don’t see evidence of gang association," said Palmer. "It just feels like a dirtying up of the defendant."
DHS in recent months has made a number of claims about people who have been shot or killed by federal immigration officers that have not held up to scrutiny.
Most recently, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed that slain Minneapolis intensive care nurse Alex Pretti was a "domestic terrorist" intent on inflicting "maximum damage" on federal agents, when video clearly showed that Pretti was swarmed by multiple federal agents and was disarmed before two agents opened fire and killed him.
Noem also openly lied about the circumstances and actions that resulted in the shooting death of Renee Nicole Good by a federal agent weeks earlier.
In November, federal prosecutors abruptly dropped charges against Marimar Martinez, a woman who was shot multiple times by a US Border Patrol agent in October in Chicago’s Brighton Park neighborhood.
In the indictment filed against Martinez, prosecutors said that the Border Patrol agent who shot her had been acting in self-defense, and that he had only opened fire after Martinez’s car collided with his vehicle.
However, uncovered text messages showed the Border Patrol agent apparently bragging about shooting Martinez, as he boasted that he “fired five rounds and she had seven holes” in a message sent to fellow agents.
An attorney representing Martinez also claimed that he had seen body camera footage that directly undermined DHS claims about how the shooting unfolded.
No explanation was provided for why charges against Martinez were dropped.
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Trump Is Dragging World Toward a New Nuclear Arms Race
We only have one planet on which to live and time is of the essence.
Feb 03, 2026
Among the critical issues facing our country today, nuclear arms control is seldom top of mind for most people, understandably, given our myriad political, social and economic crises. Recent books and films such as Annie Jacobsen’s 2004 non-fiction tome Nuclear War: A Scenario and last fall’s A House of Dynamite, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, garnered needed attention for the still-existential threat of nuclear weapons, yet the problem remains mostly absent from our political discourse.
Part of the fault for that lies with President Donald Trump, who while constantly touting his ability to “make deals,” is missing in action on a simple agreement that would make the US and the world safer. New START, the arms control treaty negotiated by President Barack Obama and extended by President Joe Biden, will expire on February 5. However, Russia offered last September a one year, or longer, extension of the treaty’s key limits of 1550 deployed, strategic nuclear warheads and 700 launch systems each.
Trump simply needs to say “Da” (yes) to the Russian proposal, which would cost very little politically at this time. While both countries, along with the seven other nuclear weapons states, are in the midst of dangerous and exorbitant nuclear weapons “modernization” programs, neither are in a position to rapidly exceed the current New START limits, nor should they, for global security and financial reasons. While both countries tout their in-development bombs and missiles that could end most if not all life on Earth, at the cost of more life-affirming investments in human needs and protecting our planet, the reality is these systems, such as the new Sentinel Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), are boondoggles that mostly benefit the financial interests of the large weapons contractors rather than the Common Good.
Should Trump blow this chance, his global approval, already dismal, will doubtless decline further.
Then there is Trump’s fantasy of building a “Golden Dome” missile defense shield. Such a chimera is more properly seen as part of a potential offensive nuclear war fighting scheme rather than mere defense; that is if it works, which it is extremely unlikely to do. So it could be a lose-lose-lose scenario, whereby it spurs other countries to deploy more missiles and counter-measures to overcome such a missile “defense;” and it likely would not work to shoot down all incoming missiles (and would be useless against other forms of attack); and it could be used to argue arms control and disarmament treaties are unnecessary, because the shield will protect us, providing a dangerously false sense of security.
One does not need to engage in all the arguments against Golden Dome, or for investing in other, more economically productive pursuits, or think a nuclear weapons-free world is achievable any time soon, to agree that ditching the benefits of New START is a stunningly bad idea at this time.
The US and Russia (formerly the Soviet Union) have had a series of treaties limiting and reducing nuclear weapons since 1972. If New START limits go away, we will enter a very dangerous brave new world.
Trump’s famously insatiable ego could be slaked by not only agreeing to the Russian proposal, but by challenging Moscow to initiate new talks to go lower. At the end of the Obama Administration and in its aftermath, there were conflicting claims by the US and Russia on which side whiffed at a chance to go lower, to 1,000 deployed strategic warheads each. So Trump could propose something his nemesis Obama failed to do. Such an agreement might take a sustained period of negotiation, or Trump could do as President George H. W. Bush did in 1991 in announcing a unilateral nuclear weapons cut, which was coordinated with and matched by Russia, with mutually agreed verification procedures.
Trust between Moscow and Washington is low for various reasons, but neither country can afford, politically or economically, to engage in a futile, costly new arms race, and global public reprobation would be deservedly harsh for both countries. And it would further erode any credibility for the US to insist China engage in arms reduction talks regarding its arsenal, which is still much smaller than those of Russia and the US. Even at the height of the Cold War, with the Soviet Union and United States competing for global dominance and engaging in deadly “proxy wars” and armed interventions around the globe, the two sides saw the wisdom of not blowing up the planet, and collaborated on a series of treaties that dramatically reduced their nuclear arsenals, which made the world safer.
Should Trump blow this chance, his global approval, already dismal, will doubtless decline further. Upcoming international review conferences of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) this spring and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) this fall, both at the United Nations in New York, will likely lay the blame for a renewed arms race at his feet.
It is not (yet) too late. A coalition of US peace and disarmament organizations is mobilizing public action to press Congress and the White House to accept the Kremlin’s offer, if not by Thursday’s deadline, then as soon as possible. For more information on how to raise your voice on this critical issue, concerned individuals can consult Peace Action’s FaceBook page.
Time is of the essence. We only have one planet.
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